“Are the kids okay?”
I wonder this often. The answer for a frightening number of them, I think, is “no.” Whether it’s the allure of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) or Black Lives Matter activism or the cynicism of 4chan, 8chan, QAnon and Alt-Right media, an alarming number of young people have been radicalized.
There are many reasons for this. Declining stability of family, reduced religious attendance, weaker communities, and the pervasive influence of social media all contribute. But one lesser-known reason that many intelligent kids on the political Right aren’t okay is that they’re influenced by a cadre of postliberals known as Catholic Integralists (or Catholic Reactionaries), whose stated goal is to subordinate the American political project to the authority of Catholic theology.
While this may sound like a fringe sect, postliberal influence has spawned a broad variety of right-wing subcultures and influencers — not to mention that the vice president is a Catholic convert, openly sympathetic to the broader postliberal movement. So if you want to understand seemingly bizarre currents on the Right (like protectionism and economic nationalism as well as antisemitism and even Nazi sympathies), you should pick up James Patterson and Thomas Howes’ recent book, Why Postliberalism Failed.
Post-liberalism is a broad label representing those who believe that liberalism — the philosophy of individual autonomy, equality before the law, and the protection of basic rights — has failed and needs to be replaced with a different regime. There are Protestant and atheist post-liberals, but as conservative Catholics themselves, Patterson and Howes limit their study primarily to the Catholic post-liberals. They use Catholic teaching in their critique as well as political, philosophical, and historical arguments. If you are interested in intellectual history, in the political currents on the right, and in how Catholic Reactionaries have attempted to dominate political regimes in the twentieth century, this book is for you.
The title, of course, is a direct rejoinder to Catholic postliberal Patrick Deneen’s influential 2018 critique, Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen offered a respectable, academic indictment of modernity where the hollowing out of local mediating and meaning-making institutions leaves atomized individuals at the mercy of an increasingly powerful state. Deneen argued that the philosophy of liberalism carries the seeds of its own destruction.
But while Deneen diagnosed the symptoms of modern decay reasonably well, his analysis of the cause, and his recommended postliberal solution, leave much to be desired. Patterson and Howes examine, and expose, how every instantiation of liberal Catholic integralism devolved into tyranny.
As its name suggests, Integralism asserts that the temporal authority of the state must be integrated into the spiritual authority of the Church. Catholic theological orthodoxy would govern civil law to enforce an objective common good. Laws and public policy ought to integrate moral, philosophical, and theological virtues. This integration will prevent or reverse what postliberals see as the dis-integration people experience in modern secular or “value-neutral” liberal political orders.
The US Constitution, the rule of law, the protection of individual rights — these are not enough for Catholic Integralists because they fail to promote a substantive social good and therefore are insufficient to promote human flourishing. In fact, in the absence of an organizing or controlling social telos, or uniting goal, these American ideals foster an isolated individualism. This led theorists like Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule to suggest replacing Originalism with Common Good Constitutionalism.
But these ideas have been tried before. In nineteenth-century Europe, Catholic Integralists argued for integrating “throne and altar.” Religion, in this case Roman Catholicism, would take its place as the authority over personal, social, and political life. Under such an arrangement, they promised, piety and simple virtue can flourish. This integration, postliberals argue, will reverse all kinds of social ills, from loneliness and depression to low family formation and falling birth rates. They paint a vision of a more “socially conservative” society, directed and reinforced by the legal and bureaucratic apparatus of the morally informed state.
Proponents of Catholic integralism like Deneen and Vermeule focus on the use and unity of power — which is why they are not shy in drawing from Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt and the famously ruthless Niccolò Machiavelli. They criticize free-market, limited government advocates in the US of failing to conserve anything important, because they naively refused to wield political power they viewed as illegitimate. What we need, Deneen has argued, is a willingness to use vicious Machiavellian methods to pursue virtuous Aristotelian ends.
Despite how odd or archaic these ideas may sound to our modern ears, I was surprised by how many Catholic Integralist movements the authors identified. While Catholic Integralists first emerged in post-revolutionary France, these movements show up in countries as different as Austria, Argentina, Brazil, and Spain. Most of these movements occurred in the 1920s and 1930s with the development of (and conflict between) communism and fascism. In every instance highlighted by Patterson and Howes in the interwar period, the integralists allied themselves with fascism.
Patterson and Howes are not shy about using the term “fascist.” This, they argue, is the insidious temptation inherent in Catholic Integralism. What else could it be? Not liberalism or classical Republicanism or Democracy or Communism. Perhaps not surprisingly, these Catholic Integralist movements did not end well. Even when Catholic Integralists did succeed in gaining political power (or regime change), which was not frequent, they were quickly sidelined by their secular fascist allies.
The contemporary revival of Catholic Integralism operates on two distinct tiers. At the institutional level, theorists like Adrian Vermeule and Gladden Pappin rehabilitate interwar corporatist models, arguing that the liberal state must be captured from within and redirected toward Catholic moral ends. But while their anti-liberalism is cloaked in high-minded scholastic jurisprudence, their ideas feed into a coarser reactionary culture.
Popular commentators like Tucker Carlson and online extremists like Nick Fuentes boil postliberalism down to raw friend-enemy politics and crude historical revisionism. In this messy milieu, anti-communism serves as a universal solvent for fascist crimes, downplaying Franco’s atrocities or romanticizing interwar authoritarianism as a ‘lesser evil.’ Whether dressed in academic regalia or broadcast over internet livestreams, the fundamental logic remains identical: the ends justify the regime.
This shocking intellectual move ignores, downplays, or whitewashes grave injustice, tragedy, cruelty, and evil. How can it be justified? Only through a “lesser evil” approach with an even worse enemy or alternative to avoid. While Communism was often the feared alternative, Catholic Reactionaries have also often blamed a “Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy” for societal ills.
As Howes and Patterson write of early Catholic integralist Louis de Bonald, “Bonald singled out Jews as the greatest threat to the restoration of a virtuous France, as they most singly embraced the low aims of political economy and had become so rich as to indebt the aristocracy of Alsace, where most French Jews lived….In short, Bonald was one of the founders of modern anti-Semitism.”
The authors highlight another French reactionary, Louis Veuillot, writing in Paris in the mid-1800s. He built his integralist predecessors’ antagonism toward Jews into a conspiracy when he wrote: “beliefs are based today, among the Jews of progress, with the principles of philosophy of the eighteenth century or of Freemasonry…they themselves establish the reasons for the preponderant influence and the empire that we attribute to them in the Masonic Order.”
This alleged conspiracy of Jews and Masons was blamed for everything from the French Revolution to the rise of communism to anti-Catholicism in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere. Only a concerted effort of nefarious actors, after all, could explain how the “throne and altar” framework, which Catholic Integralists believe to be the natural and best form of government, had been overthrown. In the early 1900s, authors like Charles Maurras and Hilaire Belloc added racial and aesthetic dimensions to claims of national supremacy, normalizing fascism through the creation of an enemy. As Howes and Patterson note, “In 1922, the same year Belloc published The Jews, Maurras published Romanticism and Revolution. Its contents were part of the broader narrative of innocent throne and altar undermined by Jewish conspiracy.”
The German Nazis were not as unusual as we might like to think in their fierce antisemitism, their morbid conspiracy theories, and their ruthless concentration camps. These Catholic integralists provided scholarly rationalization and spiritual cover for a proliferation of ruthless, authoritarian religious states, as seen under Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, and Austrofascism prior to Nazi takeover. Each example involves Catholic reactionaries allying with and supporting a ruling elite engaged in corporate nationalism, political repression, and brutal campaigns of terror against dissidents.
It’s puzzling that modern Catholic Integralists like Adrian Vermeule and Gladden Pappin will cite older Catholic integralists favorably. It’s frightening that many young people listen to commentators like Michael Knowles, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes when they seem to speak approvingly of those violent historical regimes.
As Knowles said on his show:
“Franco was, broadly speaking, pretty good. Given the circumstances that he was in; you’ve got the communists threatening to take over the entire country and they’re killing priests and raping nuns, Franco was pretty good. Because Franco wasn’t a fascist. Franco wasn’t a Nazi. Franco was a conservative, Catholic, kind of guy who held things together and liberalized over time too, as the circumstances permitted it.”
Or as Carlson said of the Maduro regime: “Despite all [Maduro’s] shortcomings, this is probably the most socially conservative country in the hemisphere. Gay marriage is banned, abortion is banned, sex changes for transgenderism is banned, it’s one of the very few countries in the entire hemisphere with those policies.”
This is truly a reactionary movement, one so fed up with, and afraid of, modern liberalism and our increasingly secular, pluralist society that they brush aside historical atrocities — or even call for their return. Deneen, with his proposals for a “mixed regime,” offers a more polite and respectable version of postliberal Catholic integralism. But as Howes and Patterson write:
“Deneen’s narrative of liberalism is nearly the same as those found in the reactionaries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The difference is that he has removed the Jews and Freemasons as conspirators. As Phillip Longman notes, Deneen’s innovation was to ‘structuralize’ liberalism into a kind of blind social force over which no one has control.”
Deneen doesn’t blame modern social ills on a sweeping conspiracy or shadowy enemy, but on structural problems of post-Enlightenment (or perhaps post-Reformation) political liberalism. He argues that modern political orders based on religious toleration and virtue-less shades of “neutrality” ultimately fail because their drive to foster individual autonomy actually leaves individuals more dependent on the state than ever.
Patterson and Howes criticize Deneen’s arguments and obviously titled their book, Why Postliberalism Failed, in response to his: Why Liberalism Failed. Though they don’t make this exact point, one of the greatest flaws in Deneen’s book is his mischaracterization of liberalism as strictly Rousseauian, alongside a narrow reading of Locke. Scottish thinkers like Smith, Hume, and Ferguson are ignored to a fault, as is the classical conservatism of Burke. Deneen equates liberalism with godless Rationalism, ignoring the long tradition of religious pluralism and free exercise.
Amid a troubling fascination with Catholic Integralism among young social conservatives, Why Postliberalism Failed at least dulls the movement’s appeal. Catholic integralism is not new, nor does it have a good track record. American constitutional republicanism and free-market capitalism, on the other hand, are hardly the culprits Catholic integralists make them out to be.
Integralists understandably prefer Corporatism, that is the alliance between government and business, to free markets because it allows politicians to “integrate” industry and business toward the national “common good.” This corporatist, or economic nationalist, approach has been championed by the Trump administration and may explain why Integralists have enjoyed influence disproportionate to their actual number of adherents.
A strong case can be made that departures from constitutional republicanism and free markets are the real causes of many modern ills. Young people need places to belong and reasons to hope. They can build those things through families, churches, and voluntary associations without handing political power to those who claim to know the common good for everyone. Rather than dissolving social ties, a constitutional order and private property create more opportunity for association and cultivating community bonds.
So are the kids okay? Patterson and Howes don’t answer that directly, but they explain why many of them are turning to old ideas for meaning and purpose. Integralism offers a complete worldview, an enemy, and a promise that piety and order will fix what atomization broke. Patterson and Howes ask readers to look past the promise, into the historical record, and see how readily that pursuit becomes repression. Why Postliberalism Failed has shown that Catholic integralism is a brutal dead end.
